THE CRISIS IN UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000300380027-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 26
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 22, 2004
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: December 1, 1979
• Content Type: REPORT

 Approved For Release 2004/11/01 : CIA-RDP88-01315R000300380027-2
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Ftrrop. a:i Studirs, University of London.
1-o:illeri~' n nunuilt Secretary for F..)e)fonr;e, Malaya; Head
British f,ci?,:iun y ',llrssior. to Vietnam (19.31-1005).
c,rre,porid nt The Daily Ieh_:graph, 1959-1975.
Deputy Si prom:' A!lied Commander Europe, 1975-73; GG'C .end
Director of Operations Northern Ireland 1971-73; C-in-C BACH
1973-76.
Director: PvlicharI Goodwin.
Defence Services Consultant: Major-General F. A. H. Ling, C.B., C.B.C., DS.O., D.L.
Executive Editor: Group Captain H. Neubroch, O.B.E., M.B.I.M.
David Rees, a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, has written
Studies on Korea (Nos. 3, 28, 69, 94), Vietnam (No. 89), Southern Europe: NATO's Crumbling
Flank (No. 60), Soviet Strategic Penetration of Africa (No. 77) and Soviet Sea Power (No. 84).
He is also the author of Harry Dexter White: A Study in Paradox (Macmiliian, 1974). His present
study incorporates much valuable material contributed by FRANCIS M. WArsos, of Virginia, USA, a
specialist writer on security.
Conflict Studies are published as additions to the general body of knowledge for-the furtherance
of which the Institute was founded. They do rot necessarily represent the views of all the members
of the Council of the ISC.
Published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, 12/1 2A Golden Square, London W1 R 3AF
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 CONFLICT %pf(y6l~gor Release 2004/11/01 : CIA-1R0119-"i 4 9L>;ff81 tlOTb- 9
The Crisis in United States Intelligence
SUMMARY
Congressional, Executive and legislative
action has so eroded the United States intel-
ligence capability in the wake of the Vietnam
war and Watergate that the nation's security
system has been seriously weakened-and
with it the security of its Western allies. US
intelligence agencies are essential to defence
of West.
20th Century. Revolution (Page 2)
Phenomenal development of signals and
cryptanalysis (code and cypher breaking) by
British in World War I allied technical skill
to human ingenuity; breaking of German and
Japanese machine ciphers in World War II
underlined need for utmost secrecy. Develop-
ment of totalitarian subversion and conspiracy
and irregular warfare demonstrated the need
for covert operations in " grey zone " between
diplomacy and formal warfare, and both
Britain and US developed potential in this
field.
The total intelligence process (Page 3)
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Deputy Director urged three main tasks:
collection, evaluation and dissemination of
intelligence. Decrypted Japanese signals before
Pearl Harbour were not circulated to President
Roosevelt, but proper handling of signals later
brought Midway naval victory. In Vietnam war
CIA warnings ignored. (The study notes that
British secret service, traditionally efficient,
has had its disasters.)
FBI: counter-intelligence (Page 3)
Under J. ? Edgar Hoover Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) became a great law
enforcement agency which by Executive Order
moved into counter-intelligence and counter-
espionage; formation of CIA in 1947 confined
FBI essentially to internal security, but wide
support kept it free from interference until
early 1970s. US Supreme Court ruling of 1951
recognised possibility of revolutionary sub-
version leading to violence, thus justifying
counter-action in the incubation period.
Hoover's Counter-Intelligence Programme
(Cointelpro) of 1961 criticised as " abhorrent "
in 1974 and spurred national debate on security
irregularities.
CIA operations 1947-1974 (Page 5)
CIA reported to President through National
Security Council (NSC); enjoyed greater free-
dom of action, helped by " foreign policy
consensus "; Congress oversight maintained
secrecy and flexibility.
Covert operations: CIA's Achilles heel (Page 5)
Vietnam war affected consensus; criticism
of covert actions; media-induced confusion
between small operations and big paramilitary
efforts, with CIA as scapegoat, though there
had been practical reasons for clandestine work
in the Italian Communist, Berlin, and other
crises. Support for Chilean democratic opposi-
tion, ordered by Nixon, proved disastrous for
CIA. Congress pressure for investigation now
made irresistible: Ryan Amendment made
CIA covert operations contingent on approval
of six Congressional committees. DCI William
Colby said " American intelligence in
danger ".
Popular pressures (Page 7)
FBI and CIA became suspect, but needful
reforms accompanied by national mood of
self-destructive recrimination.over Indo-China
and Watergate, leading to intelligence crisis
and ultimately strategic paralysis in face of
confident Soviet power. System weakened by
"'anti-intelligence lobby "-combination of
far-left organisations. Pressure groups' motive:
to weaken, not reform. More influential in
creating climate for Congressional action
were intellectuals committed to dismantling
American power. Media pressure characterised
by same sense of selective outrage.
Congressional pressure (Page 9)
This was obviously decisive in legislative
field; " prescriptive (destructive) publicity " in
hearings, with haemorrhage of classified
information on almost every aspect of
intelligence.
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 The newAg t eF r Release 2004/11/01 : CIgaRQR$ -0' I QQ03(Q O02 rd and
Freedom of Information Act 1967 amended
to increase access to classified information;
other Acts barred records on persons belonging
to revolutionary groups; forbade CIA covert
operations without informing Congress; weak-
ened immigration laws, i.e. for communists,
and tightened controls on electronic surveil-
lance.
Congressional oversight procedures (Page 10)
Creation of number of Congressional com-
mittees led to permanent oversight bodies, with
control of funding for intelligence. New
accountability affords " intense scrutiny ".
Executive curbs (Page 11)
Levi Guidelines for FBI counter-intelligence
imposed restrictions; ban on preventive action
to forestall violence reversed 1951 Supreme
Court verdict. Ford/Carter Executive Orders
constrained CIA. Restructuring accompanied
by mass CIA dismissals.
Internal security: files abolished (Page 12)
Political loyalty questions dropped from
Civil Service application forms; security
research files eliminated; international agencies
less willing to supply information. to US
Customs because confidentiality no longer
guaranteed; Justice Dept.'s Security Division,
Congress Internal Security Sub-committees
abolished; intelligence files at state and local
level inactivated or destroyed.
The continuing threat (Page 14)
Persistent terrorist threat; over 100 law
officers killed each year in 1970s; in 1975
2,053 bombings and 69 deaths, in 1976 1,564
bombings and 45 deaths. Main terrorist groups
named. Soviet emphasis on clandestine opera-
tions; growing exploitation of front organisa-
tions. and surrogate forces at same time as US
has weakened intelligence services.
Conclusions (Page 15)
Security of America's allies affected by
crippling of its intelligence services; CIA covert
action drastically reduced at time of Soviet
global advances. No significant change possible
until there is resurgence of traditional realism
in public and Congressional opinion. Suggested
measures: re-creation of the House ]Internal
Security Committee to inquire into sub-
version; seven-year rule limiting release of con-
fidential information; modification of controls
on CIA covert operations and counter-
intelligence. Reliance on mechanical intel-
ligence methods should take account of need
for human insight and perception--as does the
USSR.
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Forthcoming Special Report
THE SOVIET EMPIRE: PRESSURES
AND STRAINS
A Study Group of specialists in Soviet affairs, assembled by the Institute for the
Study of Conflict, has produced a penetrating analysis of the pressures which could
limit further expansion of the Soviet Empire and even threaten its survival in its present
form-but also notes the temptations to yet more dangerous foreign adventures. Soviet
strengths and weaknesses are examined : its military might and great mineral and energy
resources, set against challenges to Marxism-Leninists, corruption, technological short-
comings, Eurocommunism and other factors.
Assessing the balance of advantage, the Special Report says that the Kremlin, in
its drive for the " final victory of communism ", appears to have reached a peak., and
discusses the options open to the West in the face of growing Soviet military power. It
concludes that the West need not remain passive: it can encourage the subject nations
to claim their rights, restrict the credits and technology that help build the military
machine, expand radio services to the Eastern bloc and stiffen conditions of trade-
in short, a firm Western posture.
To be published in January by the Institute Tor the Study of Conflict, #7?.)U ($16.30).
12/12a Golden Square, London W1R 3AF, England
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CONFLICT STUDIES No. 114
The Crisis in United States Intelligence
The revelations of sudden crises such as that in Iran and the report of Soviet
combat troops in Cuba have dismayed Americans and their friends world-wide, and
have put in question the effectiveness of US security services. This study sets out
the reasons for intelligence failures-pressures and constraints which could reduce
the system to impotence. Britain's secret service has had its share of disasters,
but uniquely America's CIA and FBI have now been encased in a straitjacket
during investigations Iaunched amid recriminations over the Vietnam war and
Watergate. The study, jar from being an attack on American ways, is based on
a sincere appreciation of the vital importance of American security to the survival
of the Western world.
In Britain, the Blunt affair has raised demands for an intelligence oversight
system on American lines. Before any such demands are entertained, the lessons
of the United States experience ought thoroughly to be understood and digested.
By DAVID REES
N the wake of the Vietnam War and
Watergate the intelligence capability of
the United States Government has been
progressively eroded during the past five or six
years by legislative, Congressional and Execu-
tive action. A comprehensive and detailed
system to oversee the intelligence activities,
unlike anything in other Western countries,
has also been developed. Moreover, as far
.as can be assessed, informed opinion within
the country remains apparently hostile or at
least indifferent to the new problems facing
its intelligence community.
This curbing of the agencies applies to
both the Federal security function, carried
out primarily by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and to the foreign intelli-
gence function, chiefly the responsibility of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As a
result of these events there is agreement
amongst many observers that the American
security system has been seriously weakened.
While it would be an over-statement to say
that security has collapsed, there can be no
reasonable doubt that there is at present a
crisis in intelligence.
A contributory factor has been the great
upsurge of international subversion and
terrorism in the past decade, combined with
a significant shift in the global military
balance of power towards the USSR, which
(like most terrorist groups) freely proclaims
its ambition-the destruction of the pluralist
societies of the West. There is also the
inescapable fact that these free societies
depend on American leadership for their
survival. So it is within this historic political
context that the current crisis of American
intelligence must be described and assessed.
In a more specific context, all Western
intelligence services, whether internal or
external, exist as means to an end of national
security. Thus whatever the alleged mistakes
or irregularities of American security in the
recent past the need for the protection of the
US, and with it the Western allies, has not
changed in a dangerous world. Rather, the
need for Western security-in all its forms-
has increased as the Soviet Union grows
relatively and absolutely stronger: hence the
need for a thorough understanding of Soviet
(and other adversary) capabilities and inten-
tions.
The accepted fact that internal security is
complementary to national defence is under-
lined by indisputable evidence that the USSR
presents not only an external threat to the
West but is actively, and in a variety of
guises, supporting espionage, subversion, and
terrorism against democratic societies. The
present crisis cannot therefore be seen in iso-
lation. It should never be forgotten that
effective American intelligence agencies are
essential to the defence of the West.
The enduring relationship between internal
security and national defence was succinctly
put by Machiavelli, who wrote that "there
are two things a Prince should fear; internal
subversion by his subjects, and external
aggression by foreign powers.... Even if
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there is disturbance abroad, if the Prince has
ordered his government ... and if he does not
capitulate, he will always repulse every
onslaught ".1
The corollary of Machiavelli's words was
that the Prince needed both a foreign and a
domestic intelligence service. The point is
underlined in one of the most famous bio-
graphies in the language, Francis Bacon's
The History of the Reign of King Henry VII.
Bacon shows how the first Tudor sent abroad
" divers secret and nimble scouts and spies ".
The King also needed a counter-intelligence
service against " moles perpetually working
and casting to undermine him ". Therefore
the King's agents " were directed to insinuate
themselves into the familiarity and confi-
dence " of his enemies.2
Bacon's striking passages on these themes
have an added significance today. He implies
that good intelligence greatly increased the
power and influence of the King. And there
can be little doubt that over succeeding cen-
turies British power and influence in the
world have been maximised by the country's
generally efficient security services. In the
same context, US global power : was maxi-
mised during the 1950s and 1960s by the
effective deployment of the intelligence
agencies.
20th-Century revolution
However, the present crisis of US intelli-
gence has to be described not only in the
context of traditional security methods but
also of the Twentieth-Century Intelligence
Revolution which has enhanced even further
the historic necessity for good intelligence in
all its forms. In essence, this revolution began
with the phenomenal development of both sig-
nals intelligence and cryptanalysis (code and
cipher breaking) in the British Admiralty's
Room 40 during World War I.
The invention of the Enigma cipher
machine in the 1920s, and the problems posed
by its invention to the cryptanalyst, showed
that managerial and technical skill to the
highest degree would now have to be allied
to human ingenuity in all forms of the craft.
But ultimate dependence on the human ele-
ment in intelligence analysis was in no way
diminished; rather the need for human insight
in all forms of intelligence was enhanced as
the politico-military conflicts became more
intense and more dependent on science and
technology.
1 The Prince, Penguin Classics, London, 1963,
p. 103.
9 The History of the Reign of King Henry V11,
1641 edition, pp. 124 and 240.
A second element was the advent of revo-
lutionary totalitarian movements, both Nazi
and Communist, between the world wars.
ITermetic, conspiratorial secrecy was the hall-
mark of these movements, implicitly and
explicitly hostile to the free society, and thus
calling for new intelligence techniques as a
counter. In the field of domestic counter-
intelligence, for example, ideological espio-
nage had now arrived-for a :man's beliefs
might quickly lead to subversion or treason.
In the field of foreign intelligence the
increased possibility of surprise attack was
realised by a small group of inspired British
and American officers and cryptanalysts
during the 1930s. From this sprang the
successful breaking of the German machine
ciphers in Britain (Ultra) and those of Japan
in the United States (Magic). Yet if these
cryptanalytic efforts, which were to prove of
incalculable significance during the Second
World War, had become publicly known in
either country their value would have been
destroyed. The lesson is that the maximum
secrecy possible is necessary in intelligence
vvork if the free society is to defend itself.
A third element in this revolution was the
d'.evelopment, primarily during the 1930s, of
new totalitarian techniques of subversion,
conspiracy, terrorism, deception and propa-
ganda. Irregular warfare was another asso-
ciated element. These developments clearly
demonstrated that covert special operations in
political, irregular, and psychological warfare
in the " grey-zone " between diplomacy and
formal warfare were now an essential ingre-
dient of any security system. Both the
British and the American clandestine organi-
sations developed covert action capability on
a. considerable scale during the Second World
War.
With the arrival of the nuclear age in 1945
and the continuing unrelenting pressure of the
Soviet bloc against the West, which led to
the peace that became known as the Cold
War, correct intelligence was now vital not
only to the winning of battles and campaigns,
as in the past, but to national survival even
in the absence of overt warfare. It is against
the cumulative intensification ' of all these
trends in the Twentieth Century Intelligence
Revolution during the past 35 years that the
present crisis in the US security services has
to be seen. That some reforms were necessary
by the mid-.1970s would be agreed by many
observers.
But has the balance now swung too far, to
the detriment of both American and Western
security as a whole?
2
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The total intelligence process
To answer that question we need briefly to
examine the effectiveness of foreign or posi-
tive intelligence, counter-intelligence, or
Special Operations. Thus, according to Dr.
Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director of
Intelligence for the CIA and also former
senior intelligence analyst for the State
Department, there are three main require-
ments: 1, collection of information; 2, evalu-
ation or analysis of the data for meaning and
relevance to decision-making; 3, appropriate
dissemination of findings to permit exploi-
tation by policy and action authorities. Dr.
Cline elaborates in this way:
In the world of international affairs,
intelligence is only useful if it is subjected
to evaluation and analysis to put it into the
context of ongoing US national security
and foreign policy concerns. It must be
evaluated for accuracy and credibility in
the light of its source or collection method,
for the validity and significance of the con-
tent after being collated with other data,
and for its impact on US interests, opera-
tions or objectives. The result of this total
intelligence process is a report intended to
assist policy and operational officers in
making decisions."
The classic modern example of the mis-
application of this " total intelligence pro-
cess " is the way in which decrypted Japanese
signals prior to the Pearl Harbour attack of
December 1941 were not properly circulated
to President Roosevelt and his advisers. Six
months later, it should be noted, in June
1942, intercepted Japanese signals were
decrypted, evaluated and given in time to
Admiral Nimitz to enable the US Navy to win
a major strategic victory at Midway which
changed the entire course of the Pacific War.
This was a historic example of the successful
intelligence process. A similar action mounted
by the CIA resulted in President Kennedy's
successful handling of the Cuban missile
crisis in October 1962.
Sometimes, however, despite every success
in the acquisition, evaluation, and dissemi-
nation of information, policy-makers reject
the evidence. Thus from 1965 onwards the
CIA relentlessly predicted that the strategy
and tactics of the mechanised " big-unit " war
in. Vietnam were inappropriate for counter-
insurgency operations. As early as 2 April
1965, the Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI), John McCone, was writing to Defence
3 Ray S, Cline, Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blue-
print of the Essential CIA, Acropolis Books,
Washington, D.C., 1976, pp. 7, 17.
Secretary McNamara that " we will find our-
selves mired down in combat in the jungle in
a military effort that we cannot win, and
from which we will have extreme difficulty in
extricating ourselves ".a
Thus the Senate Committee headed by
Senator Church, investigating the CIA during
1975-76, frankly concluded that Vietnam
" may have been a policy failure. It was not
an intelligence failure ".5
From these and many other examples, it is
therefore possible to note that just as there
are criteria for the effective functioning of a
system, so there are also at least five possible
major threats to truly efficient intelligence:
infiltration by a rival security service, loss of
morale, loss of secrecy, political interference,
and bureaucracy.
As we have invoked the US intelligence
failure over Pearl Harbour as an instance of
undue bureaucracy we should also note that
the British service is by no means free of
disasters: following the Philby penetration
and other security cases there were no fewer
than eight inquiries into the service between
1956 and 1965 6. These inquiries were con-
ducted by Privy Councillors, judges and civil
servants, but at least the damage due to loss
of morale and of secrecy was limited by the
closed nature of these investigations.
By way of contrast it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the glaring Congressional and
media investigations of the intelligence ser-
vices in the mid-1970s have resulted in loss of
morale and secrecy, compounded by political
interference and bureaucracy, with conse-
quent loss of efficiency. Yet so little are these
factors appreciated that there was obviously
genuine puzzled concern and surprise in Con-
gress over the belated realisation of Soviet
combat troops in Cuba during September
1979. It is necessary to discuss briefly the
modus operandi of the two chief agencies as
it was before these recent events. Only then
will the full impact of new curbs become
apparent.
FBI. Active counter-Intelligence
Ever since the mid-1930s the FBI had been
increasingly involved in domestic political
counter-intelligence. In 1924 J. Edgar Hoover
was appointed Director of the Justice Depart-
ment's run-down Bureau of Investigation (the
i " McCone memo to Top Officials on Effective-
ness of Air War ", The Pentagon Papers, New York
Times/Bantam Books, New York, 1971, pp. 440-441.
5 Quoted in C. Andrew, " Whitehall, Washington
and the Intelligence Services ", International Affairs,
London, July 1977, p. 397.
6 E. H. Cookridge, The Third Man, G. P.
Putnam's Son, New York, 1968, pp. 274-75.
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Federal title was added in 1935). Under
Hoover's rule the FBI became a great law
enforcement agency. Moreover, its relentless
pursuit of the ferocious gangsters of the later
Prohibition era made both " the Bureau " and
" the Director " popular national institutions
with broad public and Congressional support.
The G-man had arrived.
In August 1936, according to Ralph de
Toledano's biography, J. Edgar Hoover: The
Man in his Time, Franklin Roosevelt told
Hoover he wanted " a broad intelligence
picture" of Fascist and Communist activity in
the US. The FBI -thus moved decisively into
the field of counter-intelligence (and counter-
espionage). The development was legitimised
by Executive Order, and Hoover was later
told to collaborate with the Navy and Army
and to collect in the Bureau all counter-
intelligence material available in the govern-
ment.
Soon after the outbreak of Second World
War in 1939 he was given responsibility for
counter-intelligence in Latin America, but
significantly his ambition to expand the FBI
into a global foreign intelligence service was
foiled by the creation in the summer of 1941
of a rudimentary foreign intelligence service
which by June 1942 became the wartime
Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The for-
mation of the CIA by statute in 1947 (see
below) meant that the FBI was destined to
remain essentially an internal security agency.
In the late 1940s the global confrontation
between America and the USSR quickly gave
the FBI an unchallenged domestic position.
The revelations of Soviet espionage in
Washington during 1935-45, and the con-
viction of Alger Hiss in January 1950 (in
which the House Un-American Activities
Committee played a significant part) ensured
that the FBI was seen as a valuable bulwark
against subversion. On Capitol Hill the FBI
was regarded sympathetically by the powerful
Senate Judiciary Committee and its Internal
Security Sub-committee, created in 1951 with
..a continuing mandate to investigate sub-
version and to propose legislative remedies.
The House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee (later the House Internal Security
Committee) naturally looked favourably upon
the FBI. From the early 1950s to the early
1970s, therefore, the FBI was invulnerable in
Congress.
In the judicial sphere a famous US Supreme
Court ruling in 1951 was until the present
curbs especially significant for the whole
climate of maintaining internal security. In
this conviction under the Smith Act of the
top CPUSA leaders for advocating the over-
throw of the government by force and vio-
lence the Supreme Court held that " to those
who would paralyse our government in the
face of impending threat by encasing it
in a semantic (i.e. First Amendment 7) strait-
jacket, we must reply that all concepts are
relative ... if a society cannot protect its very
structure from armed internal attack, it must
follow that no subordinate value can be pro-
tected " (Dennis v. US, 341 US 494 (1951)).
The Supreme Court verdict in the Dennis case
was based on the recognition that the ideo-
logy of revolutionary subversion in our time
is more likely than not to lead. to violence.
As the 1951 verdict commented on the Act
in question:
Obviously, the words cannot mean that
before the government may act it must
wait until the putsch is about to be exe-
cuted, the plans have been laid, and the
signal is awaited. If the government is
aware that a group aiming at its over-
throw is attempting to indoctrinate its
members and to commit them to a course
whereby they will strike when the leaders
feel circumstances permit, action by the
government is justified.
The inescapable corollary of this judgment
was that counter-intelligence;, surveillance,
and other lawful action by the authorities was
justified in the incubation period preceding
overt acts of violence. However, under
Hoover's direction, routine counter-intelli-
gence of this sort was expanded in 1961 to
include a special Counter-Intelligence Pro-
gramme (Cointelpro) against extremist groups
such as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers'
Party (SWP), Black militants, and the White
hate groups such as the KKK. This pro-
gramme, ended in 1971, included disruption,
harassment, and other such methods.
Court action taken under the Freedom of
Information Act of 1967 (see below) made
public many Cointelpro details between 1973-
75 (Hoover died in 1972). An official FBI
release of 18 November 1974 gave further
information and called the programme
" abhorrent in a free society ".8 Details of
T The First Amendment to the US Constitution
reads: " Congress shall make no law respecting the
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the government for a
redress of grievances ".
8 The CIA and the Security Debate, 1971-75,
Facts on File, New York, 1976, p. 220. The first
Cointelpro action had begun in ]1956 against the
CPUSA, but "changing threats to the domestic
order" had led to its expansion in 1961 to include
other groups.
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other alleged FBI irregularities became public
during the same period. The revelations of
Cointelpro, which became an instant media
event, were above all significant in causing the
national debate on security matters to include
the FBI as well as the CIA. The Privacy Act,
the Amended Freedom of Information Act,
and stringent Justice Department " Levi
Guidelines " of 1976 were among the results
which severely restricted FBI actions.
CIA operations 194774
In the early 1970s, 25 years after its
creation by the National Security Act of 1947,
the CIA was an independent agency formally
reporting to the President through the
National Security Council (NSC). Under
the 1947 Act the NSC included, inter alia,
the Vice-President and the Secretaries of State
and Defence. Chairman of the NSC was the
President, who appointed the Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI) by and with the
advice and consent of the Senate. Under this
basic arrangement the CIA had great free-
dom of operation.
The 1947 Act gave the CIA authority to
co-ordinate, correlate, and disseminate intelli-
gence under the NSC, and also to acquire
intelligence and to protect its own sources and
methods. Although there was no specific
reference to the covert operational function,
Section 102 (d) 5 of the 1947 Act stated that
the CIA could " perform such other functions
and duties related to intelligence affecting the
national security as the NSC may from time
to time direct ". It was soon agreed by the
NSC that this clause gave authority for covert
action.
As the CIA evolved during the early 1950s
three Deputy Directorates under the DCI
emerged: Intelligence, Plans (or Operations)
and Support (or Administration). In many
ways this structure, reflecting accurately the
demands put on any modern intelligence
system, remains to this day. What has
changed-decisively-is the CIA's account-
ability to the Congress as it existed until the
early 1970s. It is this change that lies at the
heart of the current intelligence crisis.
. The relative freedom from Congressional
interference during this earlier period was
ultimately based on the " foreign policy con-
sensus " that existed in public opinion from
the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The CIA was
seen as a necessary-indeed vital-element of
national defence and security with a clear
duty to counter in a variety of ways the
activities of potential enemies. The Executive,
Congress and public opinion alike thus sup-
ported the oversight arrangements for the
CIA. It was in such circumstances that,
starting from scratch, the agency was able to
build up a global intelligence service that fre-
quently had the edge over its competitors.
Accordingly, responsibility for CIA legis-
lation was assigned to the Armed Services
Committees of both Houses of Congress. In
addition, special CIA sub-committees of both
Appropriations Committees on Capitol Hill
supervised funding. For security reasons
appropriations were voted by Congress with-
out a specific authorisation Bill, the funds
being included in the Defence Department
budget. Small sub-committees of the two
Congressional parent committees held regular,
secret and informal hearings on CIA pro-
grammes. Later, sub-committees of the
Foreign Relations Committees of the Senate
and House were added to this oversight
system. Essentially, therefore, CIA oversight
was carried out by six small sub-committees.
Secrecy and the need for flexibility were held
paramount, and there were in fact no unau-
thorised leaks during this period.
These arrangements were facilitated by the
attitude of such veteran, powerful Capitol
Hill statesmen as Senator Richard Russell and
Congressman Carl Vinson, who were strong
supporters of the CIA. The net result of this
oversight system was that, according to Dr.
Ray S. Cline, "a dozen or so key members
of Congress knew what the general intelli-
gence was like and the money got voted ".
Cline comments that this procedure " gave
the CIA and the intelligence programmes it
sponsored an exceptionally privileged position
in the legislative process ".?
Covert operations: C/A's Achilles heel
By the late 1960s the Vietnam war began
to break down the " foreign policy con-
sensus " which had existed since 1947. Events
moved towards a far-reaching Congressional
investigation of the CIA and a drastic re-
structuring of arrangements for its oversight.
The catalysts in this process were the covert
action programmes of the CIA. In the past
such special operations had merged into large
paramilitary efforts such as those in Guate-
mala (1954) and the Bay of Pigs fiasco of
1961. Supposedly covert action programmes
in Indo-China generally during the late 1960s
and early 1970s were. conducted with a great
deal of publicity, and this now became a
major political liability for the CIA.
From its very beginnings the CIA had
excellent reasons for its covert programmes.
Large-scale Soviet subversion in Western
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agency. Under Presidents Truman, Eisen-
hower and Kennedy it had worked broadly as
originally planned within the NSC system set
up in. 1947. However, Presidents Johnson and
Nixon tended to view the CIA as " an instru-
ment for the execution of White House wishes
by secret action ".11 In this context it was
ordered by President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger
to support the Chilean democratic opposition
to the 1970-73 Marxist regime of Salvador
Allende. Around $8 million was expended and
at one stage the agency was ordered to plan
a possible coup. All these schemes proved
,abortive, but their legacy was soon to prove
disastrous for the CIA in American domestic
politics.
Following the Watergate break-in (June
1972) there came a torrent of leaks to the
media over alleged CIA covert actions in
many countries, and after Mr. Nixon's resig-
nation on 9 August 1974 the story of its
Chilean involvement appeared in the press
during the following month. The Chilean
revelations were compounded by a major leak
to the New York Times on 22 December
1974 which detailed an allegedly illegal. CIA
domestic surveillance programme involving
anti-Vietnam War dissidents (Operation
Chaos). Pressure now mounted. irresistibly in
Congress for a major investigation. On 30
December 1974 the Ryan Amendment was
passed by Congress, making covert operations
contingent on the approval of six full Con-
gressional committees (see below). Criticism
of the CIA assumed a more and more funda-
mentalist character.
Many of the alleged irregularities which
appeared publicly during 1973-75 had been
the subject of an internal report compiled in
1973 under the orders of the then DCI,
William Colby. Questionable programmes and
procedures had been discontinued, and Colby
had himself informed the Congressional over-
sight committees of the irregularities in what
he subsequently called the "Family Jewels"
report. In the aftermath of Watergate, details
of this report were leaked on a major scale.
Speaking before the House Appropriations
Committee on 20 February 1975, William
Colby stated:
... These last two months have placed
American intelligence in danger. The
almost hysterical excitement that sur-
rounds any news story mentioning CIA,
or referring to perfectly legitimate
activity of the C[A, has raised the
question whether secret intelligence opera-
tions can be conducted by the United
States ...
10 After NSC Directive 10/2, which institutiona-
lised covert operations within the CIA.
Europe and elsewhere in the late 1940s
quickly forced the Truman administration in
1948 to order the CIA to help clandestinely
the Italian democratic opposition to the
Communists. Successive crises in Berlin,
Korea, Indo-China and over Cuba all placed
a premium on covert political and psycho-
logical actions which could fill the gap
between diplomacy, economic aid and conven-
tional military action. The only dispute at the
time was whether the CIA was doing enough.
The control system was developed by the
Executive. It consisted of a committee of
senior representatives of the White House, the
Departments of State and Defence and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under the Truman
administration this group was known as the
" 10/2 panel ",10 under Eisenhower it became
the " 54/12 Group ", under Kennedy the " 303
Committee ", and under Nixon the " 40 Com-
mittee ". With the passing of the years primary
influence in the group moved to the Assistant
to the President for National Security Affairs.
He would approve covert operations in the name
of the President. Under President Johnson, for
example, this post was held by Prof. W. W.
Rostow, and under President Nixon it was
Dr. Henry Kissinger.
However, two developments in "particular in
the early 1970s were now responsible for
turning such operations from a largely
successful instrument of policy into an
Achilles heel for the CIA. The first develop-
ment was the growing and erroneous con-
viction in Congress and the media that the
agency's covert actions were typically big
paramilitary efforts. Ideally, and character-
istically, covert action should be small-scale
and deniable: between 1947 and the early
1970s the CIA successfully carried out many
hundreds of such operations, but the para-
military image, especially after the Bay of
Pigs, began to claim media attention at the
expense of all the agency's other operations
and its analytical work.
Laos was a case in' point. The CIA's
" secret army" of Meo tribesmen had been
cleared with Congress and the White House,
but when at the end of the 1960s the Indo-
China war became a subject of deep domestic
divisions, the Laos operation was severely
criticised. The media-induced confusion
between small covert operations and big para-
military efforts was to prove a major liability
for the CIA, now increasingly made a scape-
goat.
A second development was even more
serious in leading to the present curbs on the
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 er 00038039b2d as pro-Soviet,
A,yRrovrcedl F ica o[r p u~1~eC~RDP~$e~1Q@
r r r L
National Lawyers Guild, the National Emer- but they shared the prevalent weariness with
gency Civil Liberties Committee and the foreign commitments and sought to cut both
Centre for Constitutional Rights. The first the military and intelligence /security estab-
two have been cited officially many times as lishments; there was "an even stronger
Communist fronts, while the third has been antagonism to covert operations of any
described as an offshoot of the National Law- kind " (Berger). Thus although the left's lobby
yers Guild. Much of this pressure is clearly was of some importance, essentially it was the
ideologically motivated. It would seem that intellectual climate that led to the crucial
the basic motivation of these groups stems legislative and executive constraints on the
from a desire not to reform American
gence but to weaken it, and with
defence and security of the United
3. The "knowledge industry "
intelli-
it the
States.
More influential than radical pressure
groups and avowed opponents of US demo-
cracy was the new intellectual elite who made
their living in the "knowledge industry "-
the educational system, the manifold branches
of the communications media, the world of
think-tanks and research institutions and in
the bureaucracy. As Peter L. Berger has
pointed outs, they emerged after the Viet-
nam debate and their ideas converged on one
objective-the dismantling of American
power throughout the world because, they
believed, it was inherently immoral or dan-
gerous, or both. Thus the syndicated columnist
George F. Will has cited a classic statement
by a middle-level government official working
on strategic arms limitation matters for the
National Security Council:
Even if the US could attain strategic
superiority it would not be desirable
because I suspect we would occasionally
use it as a way of throwing our weight
around in some risky ways.... It is in the
US interest to allow the few remaining
areas of strategic advantage to fade
away ...14.
As the novelist Gore Vidal put it:
In 1945 we were the world's greatest
power.... Unfortunately those industries
that had become rich during the war
combined with the military [to form] a
vast military establishment. Officially this
was to protect us from the evil Commies.
Actually it was to continue pumping
federal money into companies like
Boeing and Lockheed and keep the
Pentagon full of generals and admi-
rals . . .18
Few of the communications elite would
have put it in such crass emotive terms and
19 In "The Greening of American Foreign
Policy ", Commentary, March 1976.
is Washington Post, 22 February 1979.
15 "The State of the Union ", Esquire, May 1975.
agencies.
In the context of the security debate a
whole corpus of facile assumptions quickly
became the basic tenets of the new ortho-
doxy: "There is no difference between the
CIA and the KGB ", "The Soviets don't
practise what they preach", "There is no
military threat from the Soviet Union ",
" Detente means peace ". The damage done
by these media pressures, concentrating as
they did on the alleged abuses of American
intelligence, was greatly enhanced by the
general media neglect of the growing Soviet
military power in the 1970s. Thus while the
CIA's expenditure of $8 million in Chile
during 1970-73 became one of the. most pub-
licised charges in the intelligence debate,
there was no reference to the $620 million
credits authorised for the Allende regime
by the Soviet bloc."
Of particular interest in this general eon-
text was the testimony of James Angleton, the
former CIA counter-intelligence chief who
resigned in December 1974 after details of the
agency's domestic surveillance programmes
had appeared. Angleton had been in charge of
the mail intercept programme from 1953 to
1973, chiefly concerned with letters from the
Soviet Union. This was in fact the only speci-
fically illegal protracted CIA programme
unearthed. He told the Senate Select Com-
mittee on Intelligence on 24 September 1975
that while the intercept programme was
illegal, results obtained were vital to US
security. These intercepts, particularly from
the Soviet Union, had produced intelligence
items of such value that "it could only be
assumed that Soviet officials had so decided
to communicate with agents and political
sympathisers in the US because they believed
such communications would not be opened ".11'
Media pressure was characterised by the
same sense of selective outrage over the FBI's
16 Details in James Theberge, "Kremlin's Hand
in Allende's Chile", Soviet Analyst, London, 15
August 1974.
17 Angleton testimony in The CIA and the
Security Debate, 1971-75, op. cit., pp. 20-21. It was
" inconceivable"', he stated, " that a secret intelli-
gence arm of the government should have to comply
with all the government's orders ".
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At this point the erosion of the original
CIA system by differing political pressures
was complete. A brief account of the most
important pressures is now apposite before we
examine the new legislation and guidelines
which today act as curbs on US intelligence.
EROSION OF THE SYSTEM
1. Popular pressures: end of consensus
Perhaps the most powerful and pervasive
element has been the ending of the " foreign
policy consensus " on the need to contain
Soviet power which underwrote the CIA
during the first 20 years of its existence.
This consensus collapsed with the bitter divi-
sions of the Second Indo-China War, to be
closely followed by the Watergate crisis,
which brought to a head public indignation
over widely practised internal intelligence
methods later declared to be illegal, and by
President Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
These events left a legacy of corrosive distrust
of the Executive that still remains.
In the climate of opinion existing from 1972
to 1975 new security review arrangements
were clearly necessary, but their evolution by
Congress and the Executive was accompanied
by a national mood of almost irrational and
self-destructive recrimination over Indo-China
and Watergate. Given this mood, paralysis of
the national will has led to crisis in the intelli-
gence services and ultimately to strategic
paralysis in the face of resurgent, confident
Soviet power and anti-Western forces generally.
Eventually, it is suggested here, a new
balance will have to be found in the over-
sight of US intelligence. For the present it is
essential to review briefly the way in which
the national mood facilitated pressures against
the security agencies by the " anti-intelligence
lobby ", the media and Congress. In all these
cases the motivation of the opposition in the
great security debate is an important factor.
2. The anti-intelligence lobby
Throughout the security debate of the
1970s the " anti-intelligence lobby "-some-
times known as the " anti-defense lobby "-
has proved an influential radical pressure
group. Central to its operations is the Fund
for Peace which operates three complementary
anti-intelligence, anti-internal security, and
anti-defence projects. These are the Centre
for International Policy, the Centre for
Defense Information, and the Centre for
National Security Studies.
In a speech in May 1979, Congressman
Lawrence P. McDonald (Dem. Georgia)
noted that these projects draw their staffs
from a number of far-left organisations such
as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Indo-
China Resource Centre, and the Committee
of Concerned Asian Scholars. Supplemented
by the projects of the Fund for Peace, this
lobby as a whole has developed contacts in
the US Executive branch and on Capitol Hill
and has held seminars on foreign affairs, dis-
armament, arms control and national security
matters. Mr McDonald noted that at the 1976
Moscow Conference of the World Peace
Council, the :leading Soviet international front
organisation, the US participants included
Nicholas Nyari, then president of the Fund
for Peace.
Another apparently influential voice in the
anti-intelligence lobby is that of Philip Agee,
author of Inside the Company (1974), and a
self-proclaimed defector from the CIA who
has been expelled from Britain and other
West European countries. Mr Agee quite
honestly and openly admits to socialist (i.e.
Marxist-Leninist) affiliations and his book
thanks the Cuban government for research
facilities. The Washington Post in August
1978 named Mr Agee as "the Agency's No 1
nemesis ". He and his colleagues at the
Moscow-sponsored "I Ith World Festival of
Youth and Students " in Havana were quoted
as being bent on " exposing CIA personnel
and operations whenever and wherever we
find them ".
The question of motive is also relevant to
the activities of the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) which operates as an anti-
intelligence, anti-internal security pressure
group in Washington. Part of the continuing
campaign against domestic intelligence-
gathering for internal security stems from the
ACLU's " Political Surveillance Project "
launched in 1970 to work in the fields of
research, litigation, and legislation. Research
Director for this project is Frank J. Donner,
who has three times been identified before a
Congressional committee as a member of the
CPUSA (the ban on Communists was revoked
by the ACLU in 1967).12
12 In a report of the House un-American Activi-
ties Committee, Communist Legal Subversion,
published on 16 February 1959, Donner was identi-
fied as a member of the CPUSA by Herbert Fuchs,
Mortimer Reimer and Harry Cooper in sworn
testimony before the Committee on 13 December
1955, 14 December 1955 and 1 March 1956 res-
pectively. All three were former CPUSA members
who, on first-hand knowledge, testified to Donner's
having been " a member of a Communist cell com-
prised of lawyers employed by the National Labor
Relations Board in Washington " during the 1940s. On
28 June 1956, Danner appeared before Un-American
Activities Committee and " invoked the First and Fifth
Amendments " when questioned on CP membership.
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Workers' Party was portrayed as a " fringe " now turn.
or " unpopular " group persecuted by the
FBI. Yet as long ago as 1941 top SWP leaders
had been convicted for advocating the over-
throw of the government by force and vio-
lence. Today, the SWP publicly disavows
terrorism, but only for tactical reasons. Force
is envisaged as part of the ultimate " mass
armed struggle ". Haphazard, isolated terror-
ism is considered detrimental to the present
phase of the " Workers' movement ".
But the media ignored the fact that the
SWP is a constituent part of the Trotskyist
Fourth Internationale, which openly reveres
the memory, teachings and doctrine of Leon
Trotsky, who quelled the Soviet" sailors' revolt
at Kronstadt in 1920. A well-known work on
the Communist use of political violence records
that it'was Trotsky--in his polemic against Karl
Kautsky-who " provided perhaps the most
elaborate justification for the use of political
terror, violence and intimidation . . ." 1e
4. Congressional pressure: "prescriptive
publicity "
Of all the pressures which brought about
the erosion of the American intelligence
agencies, it was pressure by Congress that
of course proved decisive. Pressure was not
only through legislation and continuing over-
sight; Congress used to the full its historic
power,of investigation, and with it the power
of what has been called " prescriptive pub-
licity ". Professor Earl Latham has described
this as a historic form of social control, " by
which is meant a form of public notice
intended to instruct and deter ... the sanc-
tion of prescriptive publicity was social dis-
approval and whatever personal consequences
(like loss of employment) that might follow
public exposure . .. the publicity that destroys
and is intended to destroy ..."ls
This weapon of " prescriptive publicity "
was wielded by Congress during the prolonged
intelligence hearings during 1975-76 (see
below). Quite deliberately, Congress decided
that an extensive haemorrhage of classified
information on almost every aspect of intelli-
gence was a means of applying political
pressure on the CIA and FBI. In this way
national approval was sought-and obtained
-for the new legislative and oversight
arrangements that govern operations today.
is Alexander Dallin and George W. Breslauer,
Political Terror in Communist Systems, Stanford
University Press, Calif., 1970, p. 11.
is Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in
Washington, Harvard University Press, 1966, pp.
381-2,386.
THE NEW CURBS
Following the destructive pressures a com-
pletely new review system has been created
by four distinct means, so that intelligence is
now encased in an institutional framework
that has no precise analogy in any other
democratic country:
1. Legislative restraints
During 1974-75 Congress passed three
major pieces of legislation which effectively
curtailed the security operations of the
agencies. Two other Bills affecting national
security were passed during 1977-78. These
five Acts are now briefly summarised.
(a) THE AMENDED FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
AcT, 1974. Following the publication of the
Pentagon Papers in June 1971 pressure grew
in Congress for amendments to toughen the
1967 Freedom of Information Act. These
amendments would allow greatly increased
public access to classified information, and in
case of dispute allow the courts to review the
classification of government documents.
Accordingly, during 1974, as pressure
mounted against the CIA and FBI, it was
made mandatory for executive agencies to
reply to requests for classified information
within ten days and administrative sanctions
were prescribed in the case of arbitrary with-
holding of information. Atomic, crypt-
analytic, and CIA personnel information
remain covered by special secrecy legislation,
as does the CIA's duty to protect its " sources
and methods " under the 1947 National
Security Act. However, as finally approved,
the Amended Act states that in the field of
"National Defense and Foreign Policy" only
specifically classified material may be with-
held. The amendments to the FOI Act were
vetoed by President Ford on 17 October 1974,
overriden by Congress on 21 November 1974,
and became law on 19 February 1975.
(b) THE PRIVACY AcT of 1974 according to
Section 2 permits an individual " to determine
what records pertaining to him are collected,
maintained, used or disseminated " by govern-
ment agencies. Exchange of such data by the
Executive agencies is barred, except for
" routine " use. There is an exception for
CIA and other law enforcement agencies,
but in general the right to examine such
records is upheld by a series of statutory pro-
visions, backed by civil and criminal sanc-
tions.
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A provision which many consider weakens
Federal security even more than the Amended
Freedom of Information Act is contained in
Section E (7) of the Privacy Act. It bans the
keeping of records showing how any indi-
vidual " exercises rights guaranteed by the
First Amendment ..." unless authorised by
statute or in the course of an actual law
enforcement enquiry. In this way, the keeping
of records on individuals belonging to revo-
lutionary and subversive groups is barred.
The Privacy Bill was passed by the Senate
on 17 December 1974 by the House on 18
December and became law on 27 September
1975.
(c) THE "RYAN *AMENDMENT" (DECEMBER
1974). The above two Acts affect primarily,
though not exclusively, internal security. On
30 December 1974 Congressman Leo Ryan
(Dem. Calif.) proposed an amendment to the
Foreign Assistance Bill to limit CIA covert
activities. The Amendment, passed into law,
forbids the President to authorise any CIA
covert operation abroad without informing
the appropriate committees of Congress, i.e.
the Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and
Appropriations Committees of both Houses.
According to a recent survey of new Con-
gressional oversight measures by the Staff
Director of the House Permanent Intelligence
Committee, Dr Thomas K. Latimer, the
Ryan Amendment has been followed by a
"dramatic decrease" in CIA covert opera-
tions.20
(d) THE " MCGOVERN AMENDMENT " (AUGUST
1977) to the State Department Authorisation
Bill modified the US Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1952. It provides that alle-
gations of CP membership are not now
sufficient grounds for the denial of a non-
immigrant visa to the US. This procedure
was adopted to ensure "greater US com-
pliance " with the Helsinki accords of August
1975. The Amendment became law on 14
August 1977. A waiver clause provides that
the Secretary of State can determine that the
admission of an alien would be contrary to
the . security of the US, and so prohibit
admission. Nevertheless, six months after the
passing of the Amendment the " World Peace
Council " held its first meeting in the US since
1949. The WPC is generally held to be the
most important Soviet international front
organisation, with the task of mobilising and
orchestrating anti-US propaganda on a global
basis.
20 Thomas K. Latimer, "US Intelligence and the
Congress", Strategic Review, Washington, DC,
Summer 1979, p. 49.
(e) FOREIGN ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE ACT
(1978), which became law on 25 October 1978,
for the first time requires the Executive branch
to seek a warrant to monitor electronically
a US citizen (or permanent resident alien)
.for national security purposes. 'Previously the
inherent powers of the Presidency were held
to be sufficient to approve such surveillance
without a warrant.
2. Congressional oversight
As a preliminary to developing new over-
sight procedures over the agencies, both
Houses of Congress conducted a full-scale
investigation during 1975-76. A Senate reso-
lution on 21 January 1975 created a Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known
as the Church Committee after its chairman,
Senator Frank Church. A censored report was
published on 26 April 1976 (Senate Report
No. 94-755). On 19 February :1975 a parallel
resolution in the House of Representatives
created a Select Committee on Intelligence,
reorganised on 17 July 1975 under the chair-
manship of Congressman Otis Pike. The Pike
Committee published its recommendations on
11 February 1976 (House Report 94-833).
The full controversial report was withheld,
but lengthy leaked excerpts were published in
the New York Village Voice on 11 and 18
February 1976.
Of great significance was the decision of
the two investigating committees to recom-
mend the creation of follow-on permanent
select committees on Intelligence Oversight.
Congress quickly agreed. On 19 May 1976,
the Senate voted to create the permanent
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence;
this was followed on 14 July 1977 by creation
of the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence. Both resolutions founding
these permanent committees stated that their
purpose was "to provide vigilant legislative
oversight over the intelligence activities of
the United States to assure that such activities
are in conformity with the Constitution and
laws of the United States ". The House resolu-
tion also included "intelligence-related" acti-
vities in its future oversight arrangements.
In accordance with these resolutions, both
Committees of Congress now exercise power
over the agencies in five ways. In addition
to their general sovereign powers of Investi-
gation and oversight of intelligence operations,
the two permanent committees have develop-
ed-and are developing-other areas of detail-
ed inquiry.
The third of these areas is the Congressional
Budgetary review, for the resolutions provide
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such funds have been previously authorised ". for the conduct of FBI counter-intelligence.
Thus in each House the Select Committee Illegal entry and harassment of suspect groups
now presents an intelligence authorisation
Bill annually. Each permanent committee
examines the budget not only agency-
by-agency but functionally as well. The Director
of Central Intelligence and the head of each
agency appear before both the Intelligence and
Appropriations Committees to explain their
budgetary demands.
Under President Carter's Executive Order
12036 (26 January 1978), the DCI is respon-
sible for developing the " National Foreign
Intelligence Program " which includes the
general Defence Intelligence Programme, and
such associated programmes as,those dealing
with cryptanalysis. All these activities, as well
as other Defence Department " intelligence-
related " activities applying to personnel, now
cone under what Dr Thomas K. Latimer calls
the " intense scrutiny which the oversight
committees give to the intelligence
budget . . .".21
A fourth area of Congressional oversight
concerns the quality of intelligence itself. The
oversight committees have been charged with
checking this and its wider relation to national
security interests. In this context, the perman-
ent Senate Committee on Intelligence has
established a Sub-committee on Collection,
Production, and Quality. For its part, the
House Committee has set up a Sub-committee
on Evaluation which investigates, for example,
warning intelligence collection and analysis.
The fifth area of oversight is the consider-
ation of further intelligence legislation. The
Foreign Electronic Surveillance Act 1978 no-
ted above is an example of this processUnder consideration is an " Omnibus Bill';
which would provide new charters for the
various sections and attempt to define and
legitimise proper intelligence activities. Other
activities would be judged " inappropriate ".
In short, in the past five years there has
been a revolution Congressional account-
ability, particularly of the CIA. Bearing in mind
the Ryan Amendment of 1974, CIA account-
ability is now spread over no less than eight
Congressional committees. However, following
the Carter Executive Order of January 1978
(see below) it has been reported that the DCI
now increasingly reports only to the two per-
manent Congressional intelligence committees.
3. Executive curbs
(a) INTERNAL SECURITY: THE LEVI GUIDE-
LINES. In March 1976, the Justice Depart-
ment, under Attorney-General Edward H.
was banned. Groups involved in violence or
illegal behaviour to overthrow the government
could be investigated, but such surveillance
must be related to the actual or imminent
committing of violence.
In this way, long-term surveillance of revo-
lutionary groups (on the historic grounds that
revolutionary ideology incubates violence) is
prohibited. It was reported that there was pro-
vision in the draft version of the guidelines
for the FBI to take "preventive action" to
forestall imminent violence, but this was
dropped because of Congressional opposition.
Members voiced concern that it would lead
to a repetition of alleged Cointelpro abuses.
Taken in conjunction with Section E (7) of
the 1974 Privacy Act, the guidelines thus
decisively circumscribe the surveillance of
revolutionary groups in the internal security
field.
(b) FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE: THE FORD/CAR-
TER EXECUTIVE ORDERS. Two successive Presi-
dential Orders have tightened and restructured
Executive accountability. President Ford issued
Executive Order 11905 on 18 February 1976;
President Jimmy Carter issued Executive
Order 12036 on 26 January 1978. Both in
particular redefined Presidential control over
the CIA through the National Security Coun-
cil. The power of the DCI was at least nomin-
ally increased to make him more independent
of surreptitious Executive influence. Addition-
ally, the CIA's external operations were form-
ally separated from the internal function of
the FBI, presumably to preclude the possibility
of domestic CIA operations. The semi-autono-
mous role of the "40 Committee " in approv-
ing CIA covert operations vanished.
Under the Ford Executive Order day-to-day
management of the intelligence community
was put in the hands of a "Committee of
Foreign Intelligence " chaired by the DCI,
directly responsible to the NSC. Covert opera-
tions were the responsibility of the " Oper-
ations Advisory Group ", also directly respon-
sible to the NSC. This new group included the
Secretaries of State and Defence instead of
their deputies, as on the " 40 Committee ".
A separate " Intelligence Oversight Board " was
to act as watchdog, scrutinising classified mat-
erial, and able to recommend departmental
sanctions or criminal prosecution by the US
Attorney-General.
Under President Carter's Executive Order,
these arrangements have been further redrawn
with greater CIA accountability to the Presi-
dent. Two powerful committees of the NSC
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 w ~~ievv ~i4c~r ~e 11 ~I e1 ~ati~ s -RDPP~ fIlAtAWggpqR;?0 711&e;nce, and good
The Policy Review Committee is generally intelligence analysis, from human sources. In
responsible for all such activity, while the the convulsions of the 1970s, this classic prin-
Special Coordination Committee will monitor ciple has been ignored.
all special operations, including covert action.
This committee will also coordinate CIA and
FBI counter-espionage. An Intelligence
Oversight Committee will continue to advise
and counsel the President. The DCI will exer-
cise general, budgetary control over all agen-
cies. In addition, the formal approval of the
US Attorney-General is needed for a wide
variety of internal security functions, including
surveillance.
In general, President Carter's Order thus
enmeshes external and internal operations in
a comprehensive and detailed reorganisation
on the Executive level. A system of interlock-
ing constraints on the Presidential level now
encompasses operations. Only time can tell
whether efficiency and flexibility have been
sacrificed. What is certain is the original
system of Presidential control over the CIA,
dating from 1947, has been replaced.
4. Mass CIA dismissals
This comprehensive restructuring has been
accompanied by the mass dismissal of CIA
employees. The removal of DCI Richard
Helms by Mr Nixon in February 1973 coin-
cided with the beginnings of the CIA's troubles
in the personnel field as in other matters.
Helm's successor for a few months was Dr
James Schlesinger, who summarily dismissed
over 2,000 employees at CIA headquarters at
Langley, Virginia. Many of these were senior
officers. The object was to strengthen White
House control.
Staff reductions continued under Schlesin-
ger's successor, William Colby. Following
press reports of CIA domestic activity in
December 1974, the veteran counter-intelli-
gence chief, James Angleton, and his senior
staff resigned. After his appointment by
President Carter on March 1977 as DCI,
Admiral Stansfield Turner decided to eliminate
820 jobs in two years.* Over 200 of these
officers were summarily dismissed, mostly
from the Directorate of Operations, with the
object of scaling down CIA covert operations.12
Since February 1973, there have been four
Directors of the CIA, as many as in the
previous 20 years. Not only has morale suf-
fered but operational continuity has been
broken, and the publicity has limited informa-
tion exchanges with other NATO intelligence
agencies. While the technical resources of the
CIA in acquiring, analysing, and processing
"intelligence remain unimpaired, there remains
INTERNAL SECURITY
Following the growth and eventual natural
decline of the anti-war movement of the Viet-
nam years there has been a proliferation of
interest, protest and action groups concerned
with such issues as nuclear energy, apartheid
and the support of liberation movements.
Many have revolutionary ambitions or affili-
ations: all are open to infiltration by such
political interests as are represented by the
Socialist Workers Party and the Communist
Party. A partial list of local, regional and
national affiliations shows the names-many
recurring in different causes--of well over
300 such groups: well over 100 opposing
apartheid, a similar number supporting liber-
ation movements and some 60 opposed to
nuclear energy.
Traditionally the US has had strong defences
against terrorism and political extremism and
subversion. The internal security threat has
been met by FBI surveillance of suspect organ-
isations, based on the premise that revolution-
ary beliefs may lead to acts of violence-a
doctrine upheld by the US Supreme Court
in the Dennis verdict, and followed by state
and local police forces. The FBI's investiga-
tive and counter-intelligence role was backed
up on the one hand with liaison on the Fed-
eral level with such institutions as the Civil
Service Commission and the Internal Security
Sub-committee of the Senate and House
Judiciary Committees. On the other hand,
there was liaison with state and local Law
enforcement agencies. Now all, these arrange-
ments have been virtually eliminated.
Here we shall briefly examine the effect
of recent developments on the three levels
of internal security: Federal, Congressional,
state and local level.
1. Federal level
(a) CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION (CSC). At the
centre of the structure of the 'US government
all political loyalty questions on the standard
application form issued by the CSC have been
abolished. On 9 February 1978 Alan K. Camp-
bell, Chairman of the CSC, testified to the
Sub-committee on Criminal Laws and Proce-
dures of the Senate Judiciary Committee on
the effect of recent security legislation. The
Privacy Act of 1974 meant that the CSC's
investigative programme was now open to
access by the subject involved. The 'most
troublesome' provision of the Act, Mr Camp-
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 bell testified,~1~~nF~'(R~g2QA/,11/Olv~dyIR(~~DQ~&e6i~8~SF~007fi)i30Az37w3hin
First Amendment rights, which prohibits the
filing by the government of any details of
a subject's organisation affiliations unless the
subject, in connection with such membership,
engages in the actual overthrow of the Con-
stitution or other crimes against people or
property.
This meant, Campbell explained, that the
CSC's Security Research Files, and the accom-
panying Index, had been eliminated from use.
The files had been built up by a special unit
operating from 1942 which collected a mass
of information on organisations considered
"to have aims inimical to the interests of
the United States ". Index cards containing
individual names were then checked out and
cross-referenced to the Security Research
Files during the course of a Civil Service
investigation.
Campbell also testified that : 1, Many state
and local police had watered down their
security files and thus there was no way of
passing such information on to the CSC. 2,
Many Law Enforcement Agencies did not
send such information to Washington even if
they possessed it for fear of disclosure under
the Freedom of Information Act. 3, on CSC
Counsel's advice applicants for security posts
could not now be asked if they are members
of organisations committed to the overthrow
of the government. This applied even to the
CPUSA. The Security Research Files and
their Index had not been used by the CSC
since 1975. Actual destruction had been
postponed pending intervention by the Senate
Judiciary Committee.23
(b) UNITED STATES CUSTOMS. Testifying before
the same Senate sub-committee, the Commis-
sioner of US Customs, Mr Robert E. Chasen,
stated on 5 October 1977 that under recent
legislation international law enforcement
agencies have been less willing to supply the
Customs with information, " the confidenti-
ality of which we can no longer guarantee
under present public disclosure laws ".
Negotiations with other countries leading to
mutual assistance had been made more dif-
ficult " because we have been unable to
guarantee that information received will be kept
confidential ".
In addition,
establishing a
because of the "difficulty of
record system under the Pri-
23 Statement of Alan K. Campbell, The Erosion
of Law Enforcement Intelligence and its Impact on
the Public Security, Hearings, US Senate Sub-
committee on Criminal Laws and Procedures,
Committee on the Judiciary, 9 February 1978. This
statement 'is amplified by the accompanying testimony
and correspondence. The Security Research Files and
their Index were still in existence at the end of 1979.
the Customs Cooperation Council has been
"severely hampered ". The Customs service
had not been able to disseminate information
to this group, which serves as a clearing house
for " information of interest " to Customs
services around the world until the lengthy
technical requirements of the Privacy Act
were complied with. As a result, the US Cus-
toms had been receiving less information from
the Council.24
(c) DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
1. The abolition of political loyalty questions
by the Federal Civil Service has to be seen
in the context of the abolition (in 1975) of
the US Attorney-General's List of Subversive
Organisations.
2. The Internal Security Division of the
Department of Justice has also been abolished.
This was an independent, fully-staffed division.
Its status has been reduced to a section within
the Criminal Division. Prosecutions by the
Justice Department in the internal security
field have virtually ended.
3. The Subversive Activities Control Board.
This was once an important agency of the
Executive branch in the internal security
field. During 1974, due to Congressional resis-
tance, the Executive decided not to include
a request for funds under the Federal budget.
The Board thus ceased to exist.
4. Federal Bureau of Investigation. As
noted above, the FBI is precluded under the
Levi Guidelines of 1976 from conducting sur-
veillance of subversive groups unless there
is an actual imminent threat. The net
effect of recent developments is shown by the
the fact that on 31 July 1973 there were
21,414 domestic security investigations pend-
ing by the FBI; on 24 February 1978 there
were only 102 such investigations pending (18
organisations and 84 individuals). In a state-
ment in February 1978 FBI Director William
H. Webster stated that the agency is now
"practically out of the domestic security
field.". The point was dramatically underlined
by the replies of the Chief of the FBI's Dom-
estic Security Section, Sebastian Mignosa, to
the House Intelligence Evaluation Sub-com-
mittee on 31 July 1978:
Representative John Ashbrook: In addition to
terrorism cases, does your section handle subver-
sive organisations that come under the Loyalty
and Security Programme?-We don't have any
of those, no.
Who in the FBI handles that?-There isn't
anyone at the moment.
24 Statement of Robert B. Chasen, Sub-committee
on Criminal Laws and Procedures, Committee on
the Judiciary, 5 October 1977.
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No one?-There isn't any of those . . . cases
at the moment.
You see no tie to domestic security?-I didn't
say there isn't any tie.
I know you didn't say that. The Civil Service
Commission recently told the Senate Judiciary
Committee that they do not report mere mem-
bership in subversive groups to the hiring agency.
I am just wondering if the FBI does not watch
the subversive groups, you don't report mere
membership, is there any way to know if some-
one is a member, let alone if his membership
activities are such that he would be barred from
Federal employment? There is not any way,
Sir.zs
2. Congressional level
(a) UNITED STATES SENATE. In late 1978 the
important standing Sub-committee on Internal
Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee
was abolished. Since 1951 it had provided a
permanent legislative inquiry into revolution-
ary and subversive activities. The former
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Senator James Eastland, who had a long stand-
ing interest in internal security, retired in late
1978. He was replaced by Senator Edward
Kennedy.
(b) HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. At the
beginning of the 94th Congress in January
1975 the Committee on Internal Security was
abolished. Its functions were transferred to
the house Judiciary Committee. Since then
there has been no Congressional inquiry---in
either House-on internal terrorism. How-
ever, during both the last and current session
of Congress, resolutions have been introduced
by Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald
(Dem/Georgia) and Congressman John M.
Ashbrook (Rep/Ohio) to re-establish the
House Internal Security Committee which
would have powers to conduct a continuing
inquiry into terrorist and other subversive
activity with a view to legislation. The resolu-
tion is at present blocked by the House Rules
Committee despite support by about 142 mem-
bers of the House.
3. State and local level
In the past a large proportion of subversive
and terrorist activity has occurred on a state
or local level, but over the past decade. police
counter-intelligence units all over the country
have been seriously weakened. In Chicago, for
example, court action under recent legislation
by the far-left " Alliance to End Repression "
has virtually paralysed the intelligence activi-
25 Testimony of Sebastian Mignosa, US House of
Representatives, Sub-committee on Evaluation, Per-
manent Select Committee on Intelligence, 31 July
1978.
ties of the Police Department, which has
now sealed its voluminous files.
In Texas, intelligence files on the state level
have been destroyed, as in Baltimore, Mary-
land. During 1973 the New York City Police
Commissioner stated that at least 80 per cent
of the Department's Intelligence Unit files on
" public security matters " had been " pur-
ged ". Press reports state that both in New
York City and Los Angeles membership of
the CPUSA or the Trotskyist SW:P is no longer
recorded in police files.
The difficulties encountered were illustrated
in January 1975 when the Puerto Rican Front
of Armed Liberation (FALN) bombed a New
York tavern, killing four people and injuring
many others. In the inquiry the New York
police had to ask police in other areas for
:intelligence, as the Department had already
destroyed its files on Puerto Rican suspects.
Similarly, intelligence gathering has been sev-
erely restricted by the District of Columbia
police, responsible for policing the nation's
capital. On the state level there is no known
functioning legislative committee charged with
investigating subversive organisations. The
last such body, a Californian State Senate
committee, filed its final report in 1970.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable fea-
tures of the security debate is the absence
of reference to the internal security threat
and the emphasis which the Soviet Union
places on its own clandestine operations. These
hostile forces underline the crisis in US
security.
Internal Security
Although internal terrorism has not reached
West European dimensions, there is a persis-
tent threat which could easily escalate.
Through the 1970s the FBI's figures show that
over 100 law enforcement officers were killed
annually in terrorist and politically-motivated
crimes. In 1974, for example, there were
2,044 bombing incidents with 24 persons
killed, in 1975 there were 2,053 bombings
with 69 deaths, and in 1976 1,564 bombings
with 45 deaths. Property damage ran into
millions of dollars. There were important
terrorist groups in action which possibly
could become the American equivalent of the
Baader-Meinhof gang :
1. Armed Forces for National Liberation
(Fuerza Armadas de Liberation Nacional-
FALN). A militant terrorist group which advo-
cates the independence of Puerto Rico from
the US. It has been responsible for a series
`14
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 Approved
of bombings in New York City and elsewhere.
FALN is a Marxist-Leninist organisation,
believed to have about 30 activists. According
to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan and Senator
Jacob Javits, FALN has received training in
Cuba (Congressional Record, 4 August 1977).
During his visit to the UN in New York in
October 1979, Fidel Castro repeated his sup-
port for Puerto Rican independence. There
can thus be no doubt of Cuban, and therefore
KGB, involvement.
2. New World Liberation Front (NWLF).
Responsible for a series of bombings on the
American West Coast. Claims to concentrate
its activities on business offices and utilities
associated with the " ruling class ". Other tar-
gets have included hotels and clubs.
3. Weather Underground Organisation
(WUO or "Weathermen "). The best known
US terrorist group, formed in 1969 following
the break-up of the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS). Claims credit for over 30 bomb-
ings since 1970. WUO emphasises its solidarity
with revolutionaries of the Third World and
with ethnic minorities within the US. The
Cuban government has provided transporta-
tion for WUO members to Czechoslovakia,
where they receive fake passports to re-enter.
the US.
4. Black terrorist groups. These include the
Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Lib-
eration Army (BLA). Ideologically, these
groups are Marxist in sympathy, although pre-
cise definition is not possible. The common
factor is their espousal of violence against the
existing order."
MOSCOW'S CLANDESTINE CAMPAIGN
Although the Soviet push towards strategic
and conventional superiority over the West
is generally acknowledged at the end of the
1970s, there is far less awareness of the self-
proclaimed Soviet stress on clandestine work
as an indispensable means of breaking the will
of the " imperialist " West.
Thus during the past decade the Soviet
emphasis on clandestine work has included
significant backing of terrorist, guerilla and
surrogate forces under the aegis of the
KGB-backing which increases in scope and
intensity annually. Soviet clandestine exploi-
tation of international front organisations is
on the increase, and its activities in the field
of deception, propaganda and disinformation
has reached new dimensions. It is this mount-
26 For a general survey see Terrorism in America:
The Developing Internal Security, Samuel T. Francis
and William T. Poole, Heritage Foundation,
Washington 1978.
ing Soviet emphasis on all aspects of intelli-
gence works that provides the foundations of
the more visible Soviet strategic successes in
Africa, the Middle East and South East
Asia.2i
A leading Soviet work on strategic doc-
trine, cited in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
as a basic reference, notes:
Economic and ideological struggle, open
and secret diplomacy, and other forms
of struggle, are used not only to further
the armed struggle but also to supple-
ment it, and in aggregate they are able
to break the will of the enemy to resist
and thus secure victory. These are all
means of waging war, its component
parts ...2B
In contrast, as we have seen in this paper,
the US has curbed its intelligence agencies to
an unprecedented extent. But as the Rocke-
feller Report to the President (1975) noted,
even if the US completely abolished its
security agencies, the Soviet bloc security
services, half a million strong, would remain
unaltered. So, in contrast to the US attitude,
the Soviet Union puts increasing stress on
secret operations as an integral part of its
programme of achieving global victory. This,
perhaps, is the most sinister aspect of the
crisis of American intelligence.
CONCLUSIONS. Weakening of US
security
The weakening of the entire American
security system affects not only American
security but ultimately the security of its
allies. Yet the extent of this crippling action
is but little realised outside the United
States. Specifically, the Privacy and Amended
Freedom of Information Acts have opened
hitherto closed security files and prohibited
the keeping of records on revolutionary and
subversive groups. Vital sources of infor-
mation have understandably dried up. In the
same vein, the Justice Department's Levi
Guidelines prohibit FBI investigation into sub-
versive groups unless actual or imminent
violence is at hand: they ignore the whole
history of revolutionary subversion, where
27 Cf. Ladislav Rittman, The Deception Game,
Syracuse University Research Corp., 1972; Brian
Crozier, The Surrogate Forces of the Soviet Union,
Conflict Studies No. 92, ISC, London, February 1978.
For KGB organisation see The Soviet Empire Pres-
sures and Strains, Special Report, January 1980.
211 Marxism-Leninism on War and Army, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1972 ed., p. 11. By Col. B.
Byely and "philosophers, historians, and teachers at
Soviet Military Establishments". (USAF facsimile
edition).
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ideology invariably incubates violence over a
period.
In the field of external security the effects
have been even' more drastic. The Ryan
Amendment precludes CIA covert operations
unless specifically reported to six full Con-
gressional committees. Such operations have
drastically declined at a time of Soviet global
advances. In addition, the creation of two
permanent Congressional Oversight Commit-
tees over the agencies has made the entire
performance of American security subject to
the most searching inquiry in public.
What is to be done? There can be no signi-
ficant recasting of these legislative arrange-
ments until there is a change of public and
Congressional opinion. It is to be hoped that
the recent trends noted by W. Scott
Thompson 29-a resurgence of the traditional
realism that for so long underlay American
foreign policy and the suggestion that the new
elite was out of step with political reality-
do not presage a false dawn. Meanwhile
certain legislative measures may be recom-
mended in the interests of the United States
but also in the longer-term interests of her
allies and others who depend on her.
These measures would include revival of
the House Internal Security Committee
charged with a continuing legislative inquiry
into subversion and international terrorism as
it affects the US. There should also be a
seven-year limitation on releasing confidential
information and files to the public. The
stringent rules on CIA covert operations
should also be relaxed with the repeal, if
possible, of the hastily-passed Ryan Amend-
ment of 1974. It is suggested also that the
1976 Levi Guidelines should be modified to
allow long-term surveillance-within the law
-of subversive groups.
These are minimal measures if American
security is to cope adequately with the chal-
lenges, internal and external, of an increas-
ingly dangerous world.
Jeopardising the West
In the wider historical context two aspects
should be noted:
? The intelligence crisis has to be seen in the
context of the shifting global balance of
power towards the USSR in the 1970s. As we
have seen, Soviet doctrine places great
29 Realism in Foreign Policy, New York Times,
$ October 1979.
emphasis on intelligence work as a means of
breaking the will of the free nations. This has
been accompanied by important Soviet
politico-military advances in Africa and the
Middle East in which the foundations of
success have been laid by surrogate forces
and other clandestine operations under KGB
diirection. At the very moment when the US
has been decisively restricting its intelligence
capability the Soviets have been expanding
such operations in a global strategic context.
Continuation of this folly could place the
West in great jeopardy.
? A final paradox is that the USSR, a collect-
ivist, totalitarian society, attaches much
importance to the classic qualities of indivi-
dual morale and perception in intelligence
work. This is a lesson to be drawn from the
remarkable careers of such Soviet agents as
Sorge, Fuchs, Philby and Colonel Abel. On
the twentieth anniversary of the execution of
Richard Sorge, the Soviet master-spy in Japan
on the eve of the Pacific War, Moscow's
I:zvestiya wrote on 4 September 1964:
A spy is above all a man of politics, who
must be able to grasp, analyse and
connect in his mind events which seem-
ingly have no connection ... Espionage
is a continous and demanding labour
which never ceases... Least of all was
Sorge like those secret agents whom cer-
tain Western authors have created. He
did not force open safes in order to steal
documents; the documents were shown
to him by their very owners. He did
not fire his pistol to penetrate the places
which he had to penetrate; the doors
were graciously opened to him by the
guardians of the secret ...30
As opposed to this testament there is a
growing conventional wisdom in both the US
and the West - generally that mechanical
means of intelligence acquisition and analysis
can suffice. This view is reportedly held in the
highest intelligence circles in Washington.
Yet the lesson of the past is that both in
agent handling and in operational analysis
there is no better and no more effective
quality than good human insight and intelli-
gence. It is in the context of this classic wisdom
that the present crisis in American intelli-
gence must be finally evaluated.
so F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry, The Case of
Richard Sorge, Chatto & Windus, London, 1965,
1).351.
16
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Appendix
Directors of Central Intelligence 1947-1979
September 1947
Rear-Admiral R. Hillenkoetter
October
1950
General Walter Bedell Smith
January
1953
Allen W. Dulles
November 1961
John McCone
April
1965
Vice-Admiral William Raborn
June
1966
Richard Helms
February
1973
James Schlesinger
July
1973
William Colby
November 1975
George Bush
March 1977
Admiral Stansfield Turner
17
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 Approved For Release 2004/11/01?CIA.RDP88:01315R000300380027 2rr.r.......,.r..r.....r?
After Iran-an assessment of
The Security of
Middle East Oil
It has now become apparent that the Shah's overthrow has placed the
world's major oil-producing area in jeopardy. But this Special Report
by an ISC Study Group points out that this is happening in the context
of significant Soviet advances in the " Rimland "-Afghanistan, Ethiopia
and" South Yemen-and it comes at a time when Moscow wants to gain
access to cheaply produced oil (and to deny supplies to the West).
The Report presents a comprehensive picture of the strategic situation,
explains the importance of Middle East oil (with tables and diagrams),
the historical background and political strains. It also assesses the military
options, but concludes that the responses of the US and the West
generally have been irresolute.
Published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict,
12/12a Golden Square, London W1R 3AF, England.
~o.onruur.rrrrrroruuruarrr.r.ruonurrrwuu.o...run.aurrr...rmun.rrrnnrnarrasrrau^u.. rrnn^srrruurrrnrruurrr
WORLD SHIPPING AT RJSK-
The Looming Threat to the Lifelines
By Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Hill-Norton
In this trenchantly argued study (No. 111) Lord Hill-Norton calls for a realistic
global assessment of the alarming growth of Soviet naval power, which he points out
has so far been considered only in the context of its relevance to East-West con-
frontation, and in particular to NATO. Rejecting this narrow concept, he highlights
= responsibilities to the north of the Tropic of Cancer.
Three thousand loaded ships are at sea every day along highways not now
policed. To meet the threat posed in the 1990s the author urges the formation of a
new alliance based and modelled upon NATO, open to like-minded nations similarly
ss interested in the freedom of the world's oceans, and the needs of a constabulary
force with adequate surveillance and communication systems, within the framework
of a determined maritime strategy. He also has suggestions for what he terms the
West's " highly inefficient " maritime trading system.
Published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict,
12/12a Golden Square, London WIR 3AF, England
See back cover for price.
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No. 104 SALT II: THE EUROSTRATEGIC IMBALANCE
In this Security Special Air Vice-Marshal Menaul analyses the consequences of the secret
US-USSR strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) on Western European defence. With US
silos now vulnerable to new accurate Soviet missiles and a growing nuclear superiority-
already at unprecedented levels through previous accords-many Americans oppose ratification.
Deployment of more Soviet SS-20 missiles, now targeted on all European countries, will
increase the imbalance, while US capability on the Continent is virtually frozen.
"A most timely analysis "-THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
No. 105 WORLD COUNCIL OFCHURCHES'PROGRAMME TO COMBAT
RACIALISM
The WCC's Special Fund, used to help finance the Patriotic Front, has long been a
subject of controversy. In this detailed survey Canon Austin traces the transformation of the
WCC's idealistic attempts to apply Christian principles to a world ravaged by war into an
uncritical effort to support " liberation " movements regardless of their barbaric conduct.
" Excellent "-Tull DAILY TELEGRAPHI. There was also wide coverage
in.religious and other organs.
No. 106 MARXISM AND THE SOVIET CONSTITUTIONS
Repeated Constitutional changes throughout the USSR's history have been conducted
in the name of Marxist philosophy. In this closely argued account Dr. Lapenna, Professor
Emeritus of Soviet and East European Law at the University of London, examines the myths =
and realities of the various Soviet Constitutions and points out that none of them has been as
remote both from Marxist ideology and from reality as that of 1977.
No. 107 JAPAN'S DEFENCE POLICY Although heavily dependent on raw material imports and the export of manufactured
goods Japan has no military alliances and patently lacks the means to defend its sea lanes.
In this timely study Air Vice-Marshal Stewart Menaul, who has recently visited Japan,
assesses the obstacles to a more realistic defence policy and the type of defence strategy
which would be most appropriate for Japanese needs.
"Admirable concision and throws light on misunderstood problems "-THE TABLET
No. 108 ULSTER: A DECADE OF VIOLENCE
It is ten years since present disturbances in Northern Ireland began. In this extended study,
based on first-hand experience, Peter Janke reviews the decade in both its constitutional and
security aspects. In particular he highlights the rising efficiency of the Provisionals and the
emergence of the internationally connected INLA. He assesses police requirements and
the need for an expanded detective force.
No. 109 GRECO-TURKISH FRICTION: CHANGING BALANCE IN THE
EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN.
Following the collapse of the Shah's regime the West's defence capability in the Middle.
East has suffered irreparable damage. Thus the political and strategic problems of the eastern
Mediterranean-the so-called Greece-Turkey-Cyprus triangle-assume added urgency. In this
timely assessment Marian Kirsch Leighton carefully analyses the interwoven ethnic, Aegean ?
and Cyprus disputes which bedevil relations between the two key NATO partners, Greece
and Turkey.
No. 110 MALAYSIA: CONTAINING THE COMMUNIST INSURGENCY
ti The convulsions in Indo-China and the growing Sino-Soviet competition in South East
Asia have revived the domino theory and reawakened fears for the area's future. In this
detailed study Richard Sim looks at the region's oldest insurgency, places it in its racial and
historical context, and analyses the response of the authorities. He further shows how
d
anger
successful the security services have been in combating Communism but points out the
to racial unity which Malaysia's tough legislation is creating.
No. 111 WORLD SHIPPING AT RISK: THE LOOMING THREAT TO THE
LIFELINES
In this trenchant study, the Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Hill-Norton calls for a reassess-
ment of the Soviet naval challenge which in the past has been considered only in the context
of NATO and the East-West confrontation. Lord Hill-Norton highlights the vulnerability of
world shipping and the absurdity of limiting naval responsibilities to the Tropic of Cancer.
He further calls for wider co-operation with like minded countries and suggests new ways of
protecting the world's ocean highways. " Strongly argued ' -Tim DAILY TELEGRAPH
No. 112 POLAND: A SOCIETY IN CRISIS
Poland's future is uncertain. The ruling party enjoys scarcely any support; the administra-
tion is incompetent; the public is more restless; dissident intellectuals are becoming bolder =
in their criticisms; and the Roman Catholic Church is exercising greater leadership. In this
wide-ranging study George Schdpflin examines the various strands of opposition and their
growing momentum. He further considers the Soviet and Western responses and possible
options in the Polish crisis.
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The Annual of Power end.
Conflict 1978-79
A world-wide summary of terrorism,
revolutionary and subversive movements
The rapid escalation of terrorist and other extremist activity is reflected in the
eighth edition of the Annual of Power and Conflict 1978-79, which has been
expanded to 500 pages covering more than 100 countries.
It is a unique reference work in that it is completely rewritten each year, giving
authoritative, up-to-date accounts of every country in which there have been
mation on the extremist national and transnational groups, collated by the Institute
for the Study of Conflict, which is the only organisation researching in depth in
= this field. Its publications have been used as reference and training manuals in
British police and military establishments as well as universities.
The main emphasis is on revolutiopary challenges to State security, but the book
also covers non-revolutionary challenges (for instance by ethnic or religious move-
ments with little or no concern for social change). Each group of countries is
preceded by a regional survey, written by a specialist, setting the strategic framework
and, where applicable, political unrest. These surveys include:
Western Europe
Eastern Mediterranean: Turkey's Year of Terrorism
Soviet Union: More Power for Brezhnev, but economy lags
Latin America: Oil Find Challenge to US Diplomacy
North America: Misgivings over Government Priorities
Africa South of the Sahara: USSR's Strategic Aims
Arab World and South-West Asia: Upsurge of Islamic Radicalism
Southern Asia: Political Pressures in India and Pakistan
South-East and East Asia : China's Brig-Power Policies
All the main entries carry chronologies. Introducing the work is a wide-ranging
essay by the Editor, Brian Crozier, entitled The Year of Passive Appeasement,
indicting the US Administration under President Carter for its concessions on
Soviet weaponry and for its passive responses to the spread of Moscow's influence
in Africa, Asia and the Persian Gulf.
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Published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, 12/ 12a Golden Square,
London, WIR 3AF, England. For price see back cover.
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3 C1 ZL1d1,__: Pr'f. vious issues available on order
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